Theresa May’s curtsey? We don’t need this deference to royals

It’s so innately weird that there is probably no relaxed and normal way of doing it, although admittedly Theresa May manages to make unusually hard work of it. Greeting Prince William as they both marked the centenary of the battle of Amiens this week, she executed yet another of those grovellingly low dips that always make one think she is either about to fall over, or might have caught a heel in a grating. There have been unkind comparisons with Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

But the oddest thing isn’t that May perseveres with this most old-fashioned of traditions. It’s that the younger royals in particular – the famously modern and inclusive younger royals, who are forever suggesting that they’re just like the rest of us, really, underneath – don’t politely put a stop to a form of forelock-tugging that has so obviously had its day.

For there is something uncomfortable about the sight of a woman in her 60s ritually abasing herself before a man half her age, who has done nothing to warrant such reverence besides being born into his current family; who may or may not prove to be a good king in the distant future, but whose achievements are so far mainly limited to having been a helicopter pilot and then having some children.

Why on earth should elected power defer to inherited privilege in this way? Does William not find it as awkward and embarrassing as everyone else does? And if he does find it so, why doesn’t he let it be known that his future subjects should cut it out?'